Cult Book Meme.

3 Comments

1. Ah, what the hell…I love lists like this so I’ll give it a try:
   Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969
   The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
   A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
   Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
   The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
   The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
   Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
   The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
   The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
   The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
   Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968 )
   A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
   Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
   The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
   Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
   The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
   Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
   The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968 )
   Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
   The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
   The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
   Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
   Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
   The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
   I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948 )
   If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
   Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
   Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
   The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
   Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
   The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958 )
   The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
   No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
   On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
   Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
   The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
   The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
   The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
   The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
   The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
   The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
   Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
   The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
   The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968 )
   Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
   Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
   To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
   A fair amount of this stuff is on my ‘to read’ list, or even on my bookshelf. Come back in a couple of years and I’ll probably have read quite a bit of it.

2. Hm, I finished twice as many as you, Dr. Free-Ride. But I must say that many of them were read for high school and/or for a boyfriend {blush}. Glad those days are over! I bet our *real* bookshelves would be more like each other’s than they correspond to this memelist. Can you tell that it’s past my bedtime? What’s in my to-be-read pile tonight?

3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
   The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
   (I read My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, which was much more amusing.)
   A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
   Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
   The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
   The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
   Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
   The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
   The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
   The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
   Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968 )
   A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
   Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
   You should read the Confessions. I’m a big fan of biography and autobiography, and the Confessions kept me company during a very tedious jury selection process.
   The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
   Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
   The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
   Read this during Driver’s Ed classroom instruction.
   Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
   Multiple times. I have this bound in black leather, with gilt pages and a black silk bookmark, and I took it with me whenever I was hired for a church solo to keep me occupied.
   The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
   A friend of mine did a presentation on this, arguing that it was the basis for The Muppet Movie, so I had to read it after that.
   Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
   The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
   The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
   Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
   Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
   The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
   I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948 )
   If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
   Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
   Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
   The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
   Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
   The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958 )
   The former two are two of the greatest works of fiction in the world, IMO.
   The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
   No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
   On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
   Read seven books for a senior project in AP English on the Beat movement, on the West and East coasts, of which this was one and his novel The Subterraneans was another. I prefer The Subterraneans to On the Road because of its interesting stream of consciousness style.
   Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
   In the Modern Library edition with “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” and “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”. The former was a look at the growing Xicano movement and was very, very interesting.
   The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
   The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
   As well as some of his Arabic writings.
   The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
   The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
   In a manner of speaking. I’ve read it, but not translated.
   The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
   The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
   My 9th grade English teacher was a Ukrainian expat who had lived during her young adulthood in Germany, so under her tutelage I became a devoted fan of Goethe, Hesse, Mann, Böll, and Schiller, as well as many of the Russian authors especially Turgenev.
   Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
   The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
   The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968 )
   The Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
   Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
   To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
   Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)
   So none of the books on this are books I haven’t finished, although there are many I didn’t bother getting into. That’s typical of me. I am picky about what I read, and generally only choose what I’m pretty sure will interest me at the time enough to finish it.
   Plus, I read at such a fast clip that many of my friends have remarked on it. I finished Eco’s The Name of the Rose in three and a half hours one afternoon, and I didn’t even skip the parts that were in Latin (former classics major here).